If your site keeps going down, support never answers, and the bill keeps growing, you already know it is time to switch hosts. What stops most people is the move itself. Files, DNS, email, the fear of the site vanishing for a day. So they stay with bad hosting for years.
Switching is a two-week project, not a leap. Here is how to tell when it is time, and then exactly how to do it.
Five Signs It Is Time to Switch
1. Your site keeps going down. A host promising 99.9 percent uptime is allowing itself about 44 minutes of downtime a month, according to Uptime.com. That is the good case. A restaurant doing $30,000 a month in online orders loses real orders in 44 minutes at dinner, and the customers who hit an error page order from someone else. Put a free monitor like UptimeRobot on your site for a month. If you get more than a couple of alerts, the host is the problem.
2. Support is a ticket queue. The pattern is always the same. The site goes down, you call, you get a phone tree, you reach someone reading a script who cannot touch your server. Good hosting support picks up and fixes it. Time your next request. If a real answer takes more than a few hours, that is your answer.
3. The bill is not what you signed up for. The $19.99 plan is $59.99 at renewal, plus SSL, plus backups, plus “premium support.” Introductory pricing is a hosting industry habit, and it depends on you not reading the statement. Read it. If you cannot explain every line, ask, and if the answer is a shrug, move.
4. It is slow and nothing you do fixes it. Google’s own data says 53 percent of mobile visitors leave a page that takes longer than three seconds. Run your site through PageSpeed Insights. If the server response time is the slow part, no amount of design work helps. A fast site on slow hosting is racing stripes on a golf cart.
5. Growth is a billing event. You add online ordering or a booking system and the host says the plan does not support it. You get a traffic spike and the site goes dark until you upgrade to the $299 tier. “Unlimited” hosting has limits, and you find them at the worst moment. A host should tell you how to grow, not charge you for surprising them.
One sign is a bad month. Two or more is a pattern.
How to Switch Hosts Without Breaking Anything
This is the order we use when we move a site onto our own hosting. It works the same if you do it yourself.
Get your logins first. Before anything else, make sure you can sign in to the domain registrar, the current host, and the website itself as an administrator. If any of those are held by a designer or an old employee, start there. The section below covers what to do if they will not hand them over.
Write down what actually lives at the old host. Most people think of hosting as “the website.” Often it is also email, DNS, SSL, and sometimes the domain registration. List each one. Email is the one that bites people, because moving the site and forgetting the mailboxes means the site comes up and the inbox goes quiet.
Take a full backup you can open. Files and database, downloaded somewhere you control. Not the host’s backup tool. Yours. If the host disappears tomorrow, this is the site.
Pick the new host before you cancel the old one. Do not cancel anything yet. The old host keeps running until the new one has proven itself.
Migrate to a staging address and test. The new host gets a copy of the site on a temporary URL. Click through every page. Submit the contact form. Place a test order if there is a store. Check the pages that break most often: anything with a plugin doing real work.
Move DNS, then wait. Point the domain at the new host. Depending on your settings this takes minutes or up to a day or two. During that window some visitors see the old site and some see the new one, which is why both need to be live.
Keep the old host for two weeks. Once the new site is taking all the traffic and email is flowing, cancel the old account. Not before.
On a Partnership Plan the migration is part of onboarding, and we do not normally charge for it. We handle the list above, it usually takes one to two weeks, and the site stays online the whole time. The website maintenance services page covers what happens after the move.
Who Owns What: Domain, Hosting, and the Site Itself
Most switching problems are ownership problems in disguise.
Your domain is the address. It is registered somewhere, and whoever’s account it sits in controls where it points. Your hosting is the building at that address. Your website is the furniture inside. These are three separate things, often at three separate companies, and they can be owned by three different people.
If a designer or agency set everything up for you, check whose name is on the registrar account. A quick WHOIS lookup on your domain will usually show the registrar, and often whether the record is privacy-masked. If the registrar account is not yours, ask for a transfer of ownership, in writing. Most providers cooperate. When one does not, the registrar has a dispute process, and having your business name on the original invoices matters a great deal there.
Same rule for the website files and the admin login. You paid for the site. You should have full administrator access and a copy of the files. A provider who will not give you either is telling you something about the relationship.
If you are not sure who holds what, that is a normal place to be, and it is where most of our new Partnership Plan clients start. We can usually work it out from the domain in an afternoon.
What Switching Costs
Migration alone, from a freelancer or agency, usually runs $200 to $800 depending on the size of the site and whether email moves too. Managed hosts sometimes include a free migration when you sign up. We do not normally charge for the move at all when it is part of a Partnership Plan, which starts at $175 a month for hosting, maintenance, and support. We broke down what website maintenance costs tier by tier if you want to compare.
Common Questions About Switching Hosts
Will switching hosts hurt my SEO?
Not if the site’s URLs stay the same and the move is done cleanly. Google sees the same pages at the same addresses on a different server. Most sites that move to better hosting gain a little, because speed and uptime both count. The risk is a sloppy move that leaves broken pages or a missing SSL certificate, and testing on a staging address before switching DNS prevents that.
How long does it take to switch hosting providers?
Copying the site takes an hour or a day depending on size. DNS takes up to 48 hours to fully update. Done properly, the whole thing is one to two weeks including testing and the overlap with the old host, and the site is never offline.
Will my email be affected?
Only if it lives at the old host and nobody planned for it. Find out where your mailboxes are before you move anything. If email is at the host, it moves too, or moves to a dedicated email provider first. Either way, it is planned, not discovered.
How do I find out who owns my domain?
Run a WHOIS lookup on the domain. It shows the registrar and, unless privacy protection is on, the registrant. If the registrant is your designer or an old vendor, ask them in writing to transfer the domain to an account in your name.
Can you take over a site you didn’t build?
Yes, and most of our partnerships start that way. We audit what is there, get it stable, move it onto our hosting, and take responsibility from that point on. The hosting versus doing it yourself post is the honest version of what that trade looks like.
Where to Start
Put a monitor on the site this week. Find out where your domain and email live. Those two things tell you whether you have a hosting problem and how hard it will be to fix.
If you would rather hand us the list, see if we’re a fit. We will tell you what we find, and moving it is the easy part.
